Various criminal acts have been inspired by many television shows, movies, books as well as other criminals. A list of a few crimes that have been a result of the copycat effect are:
Television series Breaking Bad The television show
Breaking Bad has been suspected of inspiring a number of crimes. The series depicts
Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher with cancer who begins making and selling drugs to obtain money for securing his family's financial future. Some of the most notable include the following: • Blue colored methamphetamine, seemingly inspired by Walter White's meth, has been found by law enforcement across the United States; the first reports of such meth was in
Kansas City, Missouri in 2010, while by 2014, it had reached the show's main setting of
New Mexico. • In 2013, a 27-year-old
Nine Mile Falls man, Jason Hart, was found guilty of strangling his girlfriend to death, and then used
sulfuric acid in a plastic tub to dispose of the body. The incident had many similarities to various scenes in
Breaking Bad, where Walter and
Jesse Pinkman dispose of bodies in a similar fashion. It was later found out that he had been a fan of
Breaking Bad. •
Stephen W. Doran, teacher and former member of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1981 to 1995, who was suffering from cancer, was arrested in 2013 for methamphetamine trafficking when police found $10,000 in cash, as well as equipment. • In 2015, a 31-year-old
Liverpool man, Mohammed Ali, was sentenced to eight years in prison after trying to buy 500 mg of
ricin, a toxin which plays a major part in the show's plot, on a
darknet market. In his testimony, he stated he was merely curious as to what he could buy off the dark web and as "[he] had been watching
Breaking Bad, [he] just had ricin in [his] mind."
Dexter In Canada,
Mark Twitchell was arrested in 2008 for the attempted murder of one man and the successful murder of another. He was convicted of the latter crime only in 2011, but he documented his efforts to become a serial killer and is a fan of the television show
Dexter.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story On March 4, 2025, 15-year-old Reed R. Gelinskey was arrested and subsequently charged with first-degree intentional homicide for the death of his mother in
Caledonia, Wisconsin. Gelinskey stated that he developed the plan to kill his parents after watching the "shotgun scene" from the
Netflix limited series
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.
Films •
Scream: A 24-year-old man, Thierry Jaradin, stabbed a young girl, Alisson Cambier, 30 times; similar to the way the victim was stabbed in the movie. He had been wearing the Ghostface costume, and later confessed that he had planned the murder in a similar way to the movie. On September 22, 2006, Cassie Jo Stoddart, a high school student, was murdered by her classmates
Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik in her aunt and uncle's house in
Pocatello,
Idaho,
United States. The perpetrators claimed that they were inspired to murder Stoddart by Scream, which led to them being nicknamed
"The Scream Killers". Adamcik and Draper recorded documentary-style videos about how they were horror movie fans, especially Scream, and wanted to reenact a similar murder in real life. •
Fight Club: There have been many incidents inspired by the movie. One of the incidents occurred in 2009 during the
Memorial Day weekend in
New York City. Bombs were set off in various locations supposedly representing their oppression. Kyle Shaw was found guilty, and was himself a member of the local fight club. •
Taxi Driver: The 1976 film inspired
John Hinckley Jr.'s
attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981. The main character in the film comes close to assassinating a presidential candidate, and Hinckley was driven by an intense obsession with
Jodie Foster, who was part of the film's cast. • Several movies, including
Basic Instinct,
American Psycho,
Casablanca and
Catch Me If You Can, inspired
Luka Magnotta to commit the 2012 murder of
Concordia University student
Jun Lin. Magnotta recorded the murder of the student whom he had recently met on
Craigslist and also posted the video online. On the video,
New Order's "
True Faith" can be heard playing in the background, which can also be heard in
American Psycho. Jun Lin was stabbed multiple times while being tied up on the bed, in the same way that Johnny Boz was tied up on ''Basic Instinct's'' main character Catherine's bed. One item Magnotta used to murder Jun Lin was a screwdriver, which was painted white to make it look like the ice pick Catherine used to kill Johnny Boz. Above the bed, Magnotta carefully hung a poster of the movie
Casablanca, which he threw away after the murder. After the murder, Magnotta fled to
Paris (which is also an important location in
Casablanca), claiming that an individual named Manny forced him first to kill cats and then Jun Lin; Manny was the name of Catherine's fiancé in Basic Instinct. In 2014 Magnotta was captured in
Berlin and flown back to Canada. While in Europe, Magnotta used a false passport in the name of Kirk Trammel, which is another reference to ''Basic Instinct's
main character Catherine Trammel. On the footage of the interrogation, Magnotta sits cross-legged while smoking a cigarette to complete his homage to Basic Instinct
. Around 2010, when Magnotta first started uploading videos online of him killing kittens, he used different aliases and accounts. On one account, he posted the movie Catch Me If You Can'', in which Leonardo DiCaprio is on the run from the
FBI. •
KGF: Chapter 2:
Spree killer Shivprasad Dhurve, who bludgeoned three security guards to death in
Sagar and
Bhopal,
Madhya Pradesh, claimed after his arrest that he was inspired by the character Rocky Bhai and because he "wanted to be famous".
Criminals •
Asghar the Murderer:
Hoshang Amini, who murdered a total of 67 people in
Varamin from 1954 to 1962, said in interviews after his arrest that he was inspired by Asghar's murder spree. Like Asghar, Amini also predominantly targeted young boys. •
Zodiac Killer: In the late 1960s, near San Francisco, an unidentified man murdered at least five victims and wounded two more, also sending taunting letters and codes to the media. Twenty years later
Eddie Seda attacked victims in a similar manner in
New York City, killing his victims with a homemade gun. He left similar notes at the scene of the crime, and also sent cryptic letters to the police. Unlike the Zodiac Killer, Seda was eventually caught because of the fingerprints that he had left behind on the notes. Seito Sakakibara, the perpetrator of the
Kobe child murders used the symbol of The Zodiac Killer as his signature. He was nicknamed the "Japanese Zodiac Killer". Serial killer
Edward Edwards infamously killed couples in lover's lanes as allusions to the Zodiac, author John Cameron even suggesting Edwards himself was the Zodiac. •
Gerald and Charlene Gallego: From 1978 to 1980, the married couple murdered ten victims across three states in a series of crimes dubbed the "Sex Slave murders". Over a decade later, from 1996 to 1997, another couple, James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud, committed a series of rapes and one murder in similar fashion to the Gallegos. They had even purchased the couple's
trading cards in a serial killer-themed deck as well as the book
The Sex Slave Murders, which detailed crimes committed by the Gallegos. •
September 11 attacks: On January 5, 2002, four months after 9/11, a 15-year-old boy named Charles Bishop, heavily inspired by the 9/11 attacks, committed the
2002 Tampa Cessna 172 crash, in which he stole and drove a small Cessna plane and purposely crashed it into the side of the
Bank of America Tower in Tampa, Florida. In his suicide note, Bishop showed support for Osama Bin Laden. The crash itself injured no one and only damaged one of the rooms in the building, the only casualty being Bishop. •
October 7 attacks: Various incidents and attacks have been inspired by the October 7 attacks. For example, the perpetrator of the
2023 Arras school stabbing cited the October 7 attacks as partial inspiration in a video recorded before his attack. •
Hinman murder: Contemporary interviews and trial witness testimony insisted that the
Tate–LaBianca murders were copycat crimes of the
Murder of Gary Hinman intended to exonerate
Charles Manson's friend
Bobby Beausoleil. •
The Dnepropetrovsk maniacs: On 5 April 2011, two
Russian youths, Artyom Anoufriev and Nikita Lytkin, known as the
Academy maniacs were arrested in connection with six murders and attacks on residents in Akademgorodok in
Irkutsk. The attacks, which involved a mallet and knife, began in December 2010. Both were arrested after a video recording showing a female body being mutilated with a knife was found on a camera belonging to Lytkin's uncle, who had become suspicious. According to media reports, the youths were influenced by reading about the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs on the Internet. A psychiatric examination found them sane, and they told doctors they chose weak people as their victims. On 2 April 2013, Anoufriev was sentenced to life imprisonment and Lytkin to 24 years in prison. •
Jack the Ripper: The
Almería Ripper, an unidentified Spanish serial killer who murdered between five and at least ten prostitutes in
Almería between 1989 and 1995, is thought have been influenced by Jack. In 2008, Derek Brown, 48, was found guilty of killing two young women in a similar way as the Ripper. He had targeted the two women, one a prostitute and the other a street vendor, because he believed that the two would not have been noticed missing. The two bodies were never found, but it is said that he may have dismembered the women in his bathtub and later disposed of the bodies. •
Timothy McVeigh: the
Oklahoma City bombing was intended to be emulated by a teen militia, the
Lords of Chaos, in a firebombing arson at a Coca-Cola factory. the Oklahoma City bombing was also the inspiration for the Columbine shooting, which was intended to be a bombing. •
Jokela High School massacre: The
Kauhajoki school shooting occurred on 23 September 2008, at
Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences in
Kauhajoki, a town in the former province of
Western Finland. The gunman, 22-year-old culinary arts student Matti Juhani Saari, shot and fatally injured ten people with a semi-automatic pistol, before shooting himself in the head. He died a few hours later in
Tampere University Hospital, Saari was heavily inspired by Pekka Eric Auvinen the gunman behind the Jokela shooting, Saari is known to have started dressing and behaving similarly to Auvinen in the period between the two shootings. Saari even made a pilgrimage to
Jokela High School prior to his massacre. Finnish police first stated that Saari "very likely" knew Auvinen, but in the final investigation no proof of that was found. • The 1999
Columbine High School massacre inspired
numerous copycat crimes, including
Seung Hui Cho's
2007 Virginia Tech massacre, Dimitrios Pagourtzis's
Santa Fe High School shooting,
Nikolas Cruz's
2018 Marjory Stoneman High School shooting, and Natalie Rupnow’s
Abundant Life Christian school shooting in the United States. Copycats outside the U.S include the
2017 Ivanteyevka school shooting,
2018 Perm school stabbing and the
Kerch Polytechnic College massacre in Russia and Jose Ramos Betts's
Colegio Cervantes shooting in Mexico. The
W.R. Myers High School shooting, was allegedly inspired by
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the pair who committed the Columbine shooting. • The
2014 Isla Vista killings inspired numerous copycat killings, including Christopher-Harper-Mercer's
2015 Umpqua Community College shooting, Alek Minassian's
2018 Toronto van attack, Faisal Hussain's
2018 Toronto shooting, Oguzhan Sert's
2020 Toronto machete attack, and Jake Davison's
Plymouth shooting. In a
Facebook post Minassian would reference
Elliot Rodger, the gunman who committed the Isla Vista killings. • The
2012 Aurora theater shooting: On July 22, 2015
Robert and Michael Bever murdered their parents and three siblings; in his
police interrogation Michael mentioned
James Eagan Holmes as a prime inspiration for their attack and claimed that he and his brother intended to commit a shooting spree outside the family, hoping it would rival and even outdo both the 1999
Columbine High School massacre and The Aurora Theater Shooting, In prison Michael would keep a journal in which he names James Holmes as his hero, and also includes a page featuring a red swastika with 'white power' inside. •
Vladimir Ionesyan: Between 2014 and 2015,
Anushervon Rakhmanov murdered seven people in
Moscow,
Russia in a manner resembling Ionesyan's. He would even use the same method as the former to enter each victim's house: by presenting himself as an employee of Mosgaz who was sent to check the pipes. •
Lam Kor-wan: After watching a videotape covering his crimes, habitual thief
Luo Shubiao, who had committed a murder in 1977 but was not apprehended for it at the time, committed 18 copycat murders in
Guangzhou,
China from 1990 to 1994. The Chinese press even gave him the exact same nickname as Lam: "The Rainy Night Butcher". •
Anatoly Onoprienko: Paroled rapist
Yevhenii Balan committed nine murders and several rapes around
Fastiv from 2006 to 2011, claiming after his arrest that he wanted to surpass Onoprienko in infamy. •
Anders Behring Breivik: On 22 July 2011, Anders Breivik carried out the
2011 Norway attacks in which he killed eight people by detonating a van bomb at
Regjeringskvartalet in
Oslo, and then killed 69 participants of a Workers' Youth League (AUF) summer camp, in a mass shooting on the island of
Utøya. Breivik's manifesto
2083: A European Declaration of Independence circulated in online fascist forums where strategies were set and tactics debated.
Australian terrorist
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who killed 51 people (all Muslims) and injured 50 more during the
Christchurch mosque shootings at
Al Noor Mosque and
Linwood Islamic Centre in
Christchurch, New Zealand, mentioned Breivik in his manifesto
The Great Replacement as one of the far-right mass murderers and killers he supports. Tarrant said he "only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik" even going as far as to claim "brief contact" with him and his organization Knights' Templar. •
Brenton Tarrant: On March 15, 2019, Tarrant attacked two mosques in
Christchurch,
New Zealand while live streaming to
Facebook live, killing 51 people. The attacks helped advance the
Great replacement conspiracy theory and inspired several other attacks, including Patrick Crusius's
2019 El Paso shooting, Philip Mashaus's
Bærum mosque shooting, John Earnest's
Poway synagogue shooting, Stephan Balliet's
Halle synagogue shooting, Hugo Jackson's
Eslöv school stabbing,
Payton Gendron's 2022 Buffalo shooting, Juraj Krajčík's
2022 Bratislava shooting, Ryan Palmeter's
2023 Jacksonville shooting and Timofey Kulyamov's
2025 Odintsovo school attack, four of which were live streamed. •
Suzano massacre: The Suzano massacre has inspired many
copycat killers. •
2023 Brazilian Congress attack: Following the
2022 Brazilian general election in which
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated then-President
Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to concede defeat, a mob of Bolsonaro supporters stormed federal government buildings on January 8, 2023. The attack was inspired by the
January 6 United States Capitol attack and planned during Bolsonaro's presidency in the event that he was not re-elected. •
Attempted assassination of Fumio Kishida: On April 15, 2023, during an election campaign in Wakayama, Japanese Prime Minister
Fumio Kishida survived an assassination attempt by a 24-year-old man named Ryūji Kimura. It is believed that the assassin was inspired by
Tetsuya Yamagami, who successfully
assassinated former Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe during an election campaign in Nara on July 8, 2022. Yamagami's assassination attempt is described by some commentators as one of the most successful assassinations in modern history for causing huge political and reputational damage to Kishida and Abe's political party, the
Liberal Democratic Party, and the
Unification Church, which Yamagami claimed to be a victim of. •
Assassination of John F. Kennedy:
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman behind the
Attempted assassination of Donald Trump heavily researched the assassination of former U.S. president
John F. Kennedy in preparation for his own crime. •
Jeffrey Dahmer: numerous murders and other violent crimes have been reported to have inspired by Dahmer, or committed by fans of Dahmer and other killers, including Chance Seneca,
Taylor Schabusiness,
Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, and
Miguel Cortés Miranda. •
Kerch Polytechnic College massacre: 15-year-old Daniil Pulkin, the perpetrator of the
2019 Volsk school attack, was obsessed with
Vladislav Roslyakov, the gunman who perpetrated the Kerch massacre. Pulkin showed up to the school wearing a black t-shirt with the word
"разочарование" (which translates to "disappointment") in red with the same font as Roslyakov's "HATRED" t-shirt. In August 2020, the minor was sentenced to seven years in prison in a juvenile hall.; According to
Investigative Committee of Russia, Ilnaz Galyaviev, who committed
an armed attack on a Kazan gymnasium in May 2021, "copied the actions of Vladislav Roslyakov" and other members of "destructive subculture". •
Murder of Nayera Ashraf: on June 20, 2022, Mohammad Adel approached fellow student Nayera Ashraf near
Mansoura University, severely beat her, and
stabbed her multiple times. Videos of the crime showed Ashraf fighting for her life as bystanders tried to help her. A few days later a similar incident occurred in which Jordanian student Iman Rashid, 21, was shot dead on a university campus. Rashid's killer shot himself dead during arrest. Before the murder the killer texted Rashid saying "I will do what the Egyptian guy did if you don't talk to me" referencing the murder of Nayera Ashraf. •
Oleg Kosarev: shortly after Kosarev's arrest, it was discovered that a copycat rapist named Valery Deyev was also committing similar crimes and even physically resembled him. Just a year later, a third man–known only by his surname, Bunin–was also caught and interned at a psychiatric institution. •
Aharon Galstyan: in 2016, a gang consisting of four men (Nazim Hasanov, Rakhim Aliyev, Sherzat Kodirov and Nakhmad Tarverdiyev) were convicted of fatally poisoning a man in
St. Petersburg in a manner almost identical to Galstyan, and also posed as taxi drivers to lure in potential victims. == See also ==